Oracle came to my college campus (VNIT Nagpur) in July 2021 for full-time hiring for Server Technology Profile. The entire placement drive was online, with the interviews being conducted on Zoom.
- No. of rounds: Online Test + 3 Technical Interviews
- CGPA Criteria: 7.0
- Role: Member of Technical Staff
Round 1(Online Test, 87 mins): This online test was taken on Oracle’s Proaptitude test platform and was divided into various sections.
- There were only MCQ-type questions, with no negative marking. Once you start a section you have to attempt it entirely, as you cannot come back to it. Once you click submit for a particular question as well, you cannot come back to it.
- Every section was individually timed, and there was a section-wise cut-off for marks as well for clearing this round.
- In section 1, there were various data structures questions about binary trees and AVL trees (around 10 questions as far as I remember).
- In the mental ability section, there were various sub-sections for logical ability, data analysis and critical thinking, attention to detail, and quantitative ability. This section had easy questions, but time was relatively harder to manage.
- In the CS fundamentals section, there were questions on DBMS, Computer Networks and Operating Systems. These were of medium difficulty.
Round 2(Technical Interview, 65 mins): The round started on a very friendly note, the interviewer was really nice and made some small talk with me, asking how my family is doing, and how I’ve been keeping busy and managing time in the pandemic.
- Then we moved on to resume discussion, I was asked about one project on my resume in particular which was done as part of a hackathon with my team. He asked about my role in the project and various doubts that he had about the project.
- He seemed really interested in the idea we had implemented, and I was asked to explain the workflow of the app we had made for this project using notepad or some other resource. I chose to go with Zoom’s Whiteboard feature, where I drew a basic flowchart of the app’s working. He seemed impressed with the approach.
- Once this project discussion was over, he moved on to a technical question to be solved on a shared notepad, which was generating the factor tree of any given number. He was more interested in the logic and the thinking approach than the working code. I was able to come up with a working code, walking him through my entire thinking process.
- He asked if I have any questions for him, and I asked him about the mentorship program at Oracle, and he gave me some good insight.
Round 3(Technical Interview, 45 mins): This round focused less on my resume, but much more on logic, thinking ability, and DSA. The first question I was asked was the Longest Consecutive Subsequence. At every step, I was asked what I could do to improve the efficiency, and I moved up step by step, starting with the naive solution of sorting the array.
After this, I was asked two puzzles:
- Distribute 10 coins among 3 cups, in such a way that each cup has an odd number of coins.
- Milk and Jars puzzle, to ensure that all quantities of milk between 1 L to 40 L can be poured in the fewest steps possible.
At this point, the round concluded and I asked the interviewer a closing question regarding the responsibilities of the role.
Round 4(Technical Interview, 25 mins): This was a small and easy round, it started with some questions about my internship experience, they wanted to know more about my role and the technology stack that I had worked on.
- After this, I was asked some open-ended software design questions: for example if you have to develop a UI that is pulling data from a backend database, what things would you have to keep in mind while designing something like this, how would you handle changes in the table structure of the database (it should get automatically handled in the frontend), and so on.
- It was more like a tech discussion than an interview and ended quicker than I expected. I was told to leave the meet and that they would get in touch.
Final Verdict: Selected for Server Technology Profile